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September 16, 2010

Vladimír Holan

(Czech, September 16, 1905 - March 31, 1980)

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On the way from nature to being
walls are not really kind
walls soaked with the urine of talents, walls running with the spittle
of eunuchs in revolt against the spirit, walls no smaller
for not yet being born,
walls that enclose the ripened fruit...

The supple ripeness of Shakespeare
invites licence. It's meaning,
which like amazement should be
festive, with the decline of the times,
(in face of the possible signs of his absence)
becomes a supercharge levied on every apartment
into which a director has rudely shoved his way.
Fraud alone is certainty here. And the spectator,
crawling out before his time like St George's dragon,
basks in the bile of the critics...
And those who dare to map desire
are at their ease, though their bad temper
shows that the brute is always with us...
Nature is a sign
which, if not mute,
denies itself. And the male of the species,
that opener, feels dumb simply because
the spirit always moves forward
while everything closes behind it...

And he was like that... Hamlet!
He had an arm missing and evening
rolled through the empty sleeve of his coat
as through a blind man's sex nipped by music...
Nature merged our contempt for the town
with the rock urine of mosses uprooted
at the golden summit of power
and waited for the caterpillar of the vine to change into a butterfly,
but waited in vain,
for he despised wine from the day
he was driven by thirst to open a horse's artery
and drink the blood...
So he made up his mind to admit the jinn
and exclude the apparently unrevealed mysteries,
and caught between himself and himself
to plead for the abyss.
Afterwards he spoke only from its depths
even when talking of a certain saint
who no longer had anything except the pain
of remembering an ancient love,
a pain little enough to be easily hidden
in a hollow tooth...

It doesn't matter
whether what we heard was the sucked saliva
running from sleeping crickets' mouths,
builders of midnight bridges,
creators who made themselves double tombs,
or phantoms whose wages is prophecy.
Only art made no excuses...
And also life insisted
insisted dangerously that we would survive,
though we might really wish to die...
There was no refuge... Nowhere, not even in the unconscious...
But he was there, Hamlet, who like a Mozart-tippler
overturned the Alps in order to stand a bottle shakily
on the creaking stairs of the fear of death,
so locked in himself that all immortality
could fit inside him...
And it is true that in his presence
the knife raised above a sheep
would not cut
and the melted pewter of old baptismal fonts
returned to its primal form.
Anxiety endures. He got in the way of eternity
and had to heal the wound. He was in the grave of the father
and had to be the child of the sons... He was
face to face with the holy spirit of music
and had to live for the takings of a whore
or the price of a dog.

Oh, not that he knew everything, for he well understood
that when egoism overeats
it doesn't throw up but digests and starts again -
not that he was wise, like a single wooden pillar
among columns of stone -
not that he trembled like an aspen facing
that ancient floor painted with menstrual blood -
not that he was a miser, thinking of final things
and living in King Atreus' tomb
where the treasury led straight to the charnel-house -
not that it mattered to him
whether Alexander the Great's crooked neck
had straightened out anything in history -
no, no, but I always see his grimace
at those for whom any mystery
is a void into which
they hurl all the fury of the castrated...

He who gives is still a miser...
But we who do not believe are always expecting something,
and maybe people always expect something
because they have no faith... They are enlightened
but don't give light... They are thin-blooded
yet for them nothing exists unless blood is shed,
they are damned though not yet excommunicated,
they are curious but haven't found the mirror
in which Helen-Helen
looked at herself from below-from below,
and they are so deaf they would like to hear
Christ's voice on a disc.

Meanwhile everything, everything here
is a miracle only once:
only once Abel's blood
which was to destroy all wars,
only once the irrecoverable, the unconscious of childhood,
only once youth and only once song,
only once love, in the same breath lost,
only for once everything against heredity and custom,
once only the loosing of contracted ties and liberation
and so only once the essence of art,
only for once everything against the prison,
unless God Himself should wish to build a house
on this earth...